was as inoffensive as the playfulness of a kitten.  Her face was round and shallow, with exquisite colouring which veiled the flatness and lack of character in her features.  Above her azure eyes her hair, which was not plentiful, but fine and soft, and as yellow as ripe corn, broke in a shining mist over her forehead.  All her life, by being what she was, she had got, without effort, everything that she wanted.  She had got dolls when she wanted dolls; she had got Miss Ludwell’s expensive school when she wanted an expensive private school; she would get the house in West Twenty-third Street to-morrow, and when she began to want love, she would get it as easily and as undeservedly as she got everything else.  She was very expensive, but, like the flowers on the table and the spotless damask and the lace in Gabriella’s sleeves, she was one of her mother’s luxuries to be paid for by additional hours of work and thought.

“Wasn’t Archibald with you?” inquired Gabriella, while she pushed the chairs into place and tidied the room.

“He stopped at the library.  There’s his ring now.  I’ll open the door.”

She ran out, and Gabriella, with the tablecloth in her hand, stood waiting for Archibald to enter.  In her eager expectancy, in the wistful brightness of her eyes, in the tender quivering of her lips, she was like a girl who is awaiting a lover.  Every evening, after her day’s work, she greeted her son with the same passionate tenderness.  Never had it lessened, never, even when she was most discouraged, had she failed to summon her strength and her sweetness for this beatific end to the day.  For Archibald was more than a son to her.  As he grew older their characters became more perfectly adjusted, and the rare bond of a deep mental sympathy held them together.  Fanny loved her as a spoiled child loves the dispenser of its happiness; but in Archibald’s devotion there was something of the worship of a man for an ideal.

Flushed and hungry, the boy came in, and after kissing her hurriedly, ran off to wash his face and hands before dinner.  When he came back the table was laid, with a bunch of lilacs in a cut glass vase over the darned spot in the tablecloth, and Miss Polly was bringing in the old-fashioned soup tureen, which had belonged to Gabriella’s maternal grandmother.

“If you don’t sit right straight down everything will be cold,” said Miss Polly severely, for this was her customary manner of announcing dinner.  Every night for ten years she had threatened them with a cold dinner while she served them a hot one.

With a child on either side of her, Gabriella sat down, and ladled the soup out of the old china tureen.  It was her consecrated hour—­the single hour of her toiling day that she dedicated to personal happiness; and because it was her hour, her life had gradually centred about it as if it were the divine point of her universe—­the pivot upon which her whole world revolved.  Nothing harsh, nothing sordid, nothing sad, ever touched the sacred precincts of her twilight hour with her children.